I'd say this is a Trump-dependent phenomenon that the GOP wouldn't see any upside in sustaining post-Trump, especially in light of how they benefited politically in state legislatures and the White House by capitalizing on backlash to Obama. Since 2008, the GOP has undertaken strategies to both preserve their power (federal judiciary appointees, gerrymandering, etc) and limit the influence of the opposition party (refusing to confirm presidential nominees) which, along with the advantage conveyed by the Electoral College, means they don't have to maximally broaden their appeal to remain viable. The latest dog whistles of DEI and CRT, along with recent judicial victories overturning significant civil rights-era measures (the preclearance provision of the VRA, affirmative action/diversity initiatives, race-specific ameliorations, etc), are too valuable to give up in an attempt to permanently capture a shaky voting bloc.
Do the math. If 33 - 40% of the population is attrracted to authoritarianism it does not take much sorting before one party becomes majority authoritarian, we have all seen this.
The appeal of authoritarianism crosses races. Trump's open authoritarian appeals are pulling non-white authoritarians over the line. This is Trump's core strategy, and he might just pull it off. It is the core strategy of all authoritarians: Appeal to authoritarians and they will come. Repetition will de-densitize non-authoritarians, allowing the authoritarian to become more explicit as time passes.
The real story is authoritarianism's enduring appeal to a frighteningly large number, and how it can be exploited.
If authoritarians again become evenly sorted by party racial polarization will rise. Contra Matt, that will be a very good thing.
Bizaarely, we would all do well if Democrats became more attractive to authoritarians.
"If this ends up narrowly costing Harris the election, I’ll be very sad about that. But as a broad social trend, it’s change for the better."
Great piece overall, and were it not for Trump's authoritarian ambitions I would agree with this conclusion. But if this trend (or any trend) narrowly costs Harris the election, I think it's actually really hard to say what future coalitional politics will look like after decades of authoritarian rule and hard-right policymaking. This is kind of analogous to making predictions just as Franco took power about what coalitional dynamics will be in the 1982 Spanish election. It's just way too early to say whether any given trend will/won't hold up and will/won't be broadly beneficial. For all we know, the next free and fair election in America will turn on rebuilding our social insurance system after the right-wing autocracy kept it smaller than the public would like (much like Franco did), and that could bring back an Obama-style coaltion.
We could be on the cusp of losing our welfare state and basic rights for women for generations and being locked out of power indefinitely - that's far bigger stakes than just being really sad about a temporary setback!
While I agree largely w/ Matt's argument, the problem is there isn't as much evidence for racial polarization as people think there is.
In good polling that oversamples speciifc minorities or the youth vote don't show the sort of swings that are in worse polling.
As I've said before, could I buy a shift of a point or two toward Trump in the youth or African-American vote and maybe the Hispanic vote being 55/45 instead of 60/40?
Sure.
But, no I don't think Trump is going to go 50/50 or win Hispanics, get 25% of the male African-American vote, or come a lot closer winning the youth vote, and I think honestly, while some of it is legitimate, these polling numbers are being used as kludges to try to move the Democrat's back to the right.
Because weirdly, whenever a minority has a centrist or conservative view on something, that's proof the Democrat's need to moderate, but when a minority group has more liberal views, that's just "identity politics."
There isn't some kind of vast Third Way conspiracy theory to push the party to the center for some vaguely nefarious reasons. There are lots of people who want to win elections and the available evidence suggests moving closer to the center would better achieve that goal and nonwhite Democrats, on average, tend to be more moderate in their views than the party as a whole.
To me it's worth thinking carefully about where racial depolarization is lower. Age is mentioned -- meaning older white voters and older black voters show markedly different voting patterns. This probably also explains an initially counterintuitive fact -- accord ing to one survey (see link) more education, if anything, is correlated with republican identification among black voters. But it also makes me think about links between education/race/income. I wonder if nowadays education 'depolarizes' race - among highly educated voters race is less a factor than for other voters.
Probably. Black Republicans, i imagine, are less churchy, because the black church is a huge GOTV operation for Dems (as evangelical white churches are for the Republicans)
I think the big fear among Democrats boils down to this: surveys have consistently shown conservatives in the U.S. outnumbering liberals, so if every conservative votes Republican, every liberal votes Democrat, and moderates split 50/50, Republicans would win every election. To compete, Democrats must either win over at least some conservatives and/or win a supermajority of moderates.
Back in the 1980's, voting was much less polarized along liberal/conservative lines, so this didn't matter much. But, then in the 1990's and 2000's, white conservatives become almost universally Republican; starting in 2016, the same thing began happening with Hispanic voters, and starting in 2020, we're seeing evidence of the same starting to happen with black voters. Meanwhile, by 2016, virtually all liberals who had previously voted Republican had already shifted to Democrats, leaving no further upside in that regard, but still plenty of conservative Democrats remaining as low-hanging fruit for Republicans.
Counter-balancing this, Trump has driven away many moderate voters, allowing Democrats to get that supermajority of moderate voters needed to with only a minimal share of conservative voters. But, the fear among many is, how sustainable is this, once Trump is gone?
My personal take is that electoral impulses to please the base and get more donations will push Republicans to the right until enough moderates are pushed to the Democrats into Republicans can't move right any more without ceding control of the country to the Democrats, while, conversely, Democrats will know that they need a supermajority of moderate voters to win, so can't afford to placate the left wing like Republicans can, the right wing. And, when all is said and done, things will settle with moderate voters voting blue by whatever margin is needed to keep the overall balance of the two parties competitive. And, politics continues the way it always has (albeit, with potentially a different set of states being swing states).
"But tradeoffs are real in the electorate as well as in policymaking."
This is true, but it cuts in both directions. It sometimes feels like it's an article of faith among moderates that Democratic candidates can always pick up votes by moving to the right or staging a "Sister Souljah moment", but I think they're not always appropriately weighing the votes they could lose on the left.
We have years of election results that suggest moving to the center in a general election is electorally optimal. Look at, for example, Jon Tester. No one would argue that the issue is that he's not progressive enough. John Bel Edwards wasn't penalized by the left for being anti-abortion and Manchin wasn't penalized by the left for being pro-coal.
There's probably an argument that moving too far to the right could cost Democrats but that would require the Democrat to move so far to the right that they're indistinguishable from their Republican opponent or even more conservative and nowadays really only happens in hyper local races in ancestrally Democratic regions.
“Activate the base” vs “Moderate to pick up swing voters” both sound plausible in principle. Both can be pushed by different factions within the party for Pundit Fallacy reasons.
But my understanding is that when the Moneyball analytics types run the numbers, it does in fact turn out that Moderation works better for getting more votes. I haven’t yet seen much good substantive argument the other way, and I’d be very interested to hear it.
I feel like there's a decent shot at a scenario where Kamala Harris wins comfortably because of increased female turnout which is skewing heavily towards her; an effect that isn't being measured by regular polling because it's not taking into account turnout proclivity. Which, for Harris, would be a very worthwhile tradeoff with other demographic groups, obviously.
First off, the Electoral College is the vestige of a Supremacist Handshake between Northern racists -- who enshrined school segregation in New York City, which today is the most segregated school system in America -- and Southern Slave owners who wanted Black people who were enslaved to count as 3/4 of a human being for population counts that would give them a little more power.
If you are going to mention the Electoral College you need also always mention that it exists to give White-dominated states with smaller populations more power relative to states where White folk are in the minority (like California, where two-thirds of the electorate are not White Europeans).
Until we have a national vote, idiotic columns like this eschew the institutionalized racism endemic to an Electoral college that allows for the national vote to be superceded today by politicians who only need to wrack up points in racist states and then convince a few folks who are not people of color but are labelled as such (Most Latinos in the United States self-identify as Whites), or people of African or Asian descent who vote don't eschew sexism or heterosexism and like how Trump degrades women and queer folks and non-binary folk that what is important is he is moralistically crusading as someone who believes, religiously, what he believes.
All across the world fear is being used to embrace those who hawk despotism as power.
When people feel like they are walking on quicksand, when clueless pontificators read tea leaves without context, they say things like the electorate is less racially polarized.
What's happening?
Some people who have been fed lies about Trump being strong.
Some people know that both parties are politically corrupt gravitate to those who will lie and promise them everything under the sun.
Puckering with the lips of their mouths and their asses, they will say one thing to one audience and a different thing the next day to a different audience but with both audiences promising to make decisions without equivocation, without thought, decisions that touch what is most basic and base about human folly.
We live in an era where folks are scared because journalists don't right about fascistic tendencies and and make it seem to folks who know better that what the country needs is a strongman who speaks his mind.
I am Black and male. More than a few black male cousins voted for Trump against both Biden and Hillary and plan to do so against a Black woman too.
Trump's misogyny, sexism, and fronting the power of male domination is something that all men regardless of race can and will embrace.
That is what is happening. Some people of color who lie in bed with fascists because fascism is not solely a purview of Whites (African and South American and Caribbean prelates and dictators who bash queers for example don't care that those queers look like them) or who subjugate with violence women.
Humans are clannish no doubt, but they tend to fear when the ground beneath them is shifting because of economic instability, racial gender bashing instability, queer bashing instability.
All men regardless of race can easily see themselves in Trump.
If the racial depolarization is due to Men of color embracing trumps misogyny. If it is due to Trump pandering to White Latinos who clueless pollsters don't see as white but people of color. If it is due to governments from Russia to Turkey to Germany to Italy to France to Nigeria embracing supremacist focused despots and folks embracing those who speak to their baser sexist and heterosexist instincts.
If that is racial depolarization, then call it what it is.
Be smarter than pontificating we are "less racially polarized in our voting."
You parrot a certain myopia when you do that. We are becoming more racially polarized in America but some people of color don't mind voting for strongmen who hawk hatred of women and queers.
For more than a decade Trump and his cohorts push propaganda and hate related to religion, hawking white supremacy as strength while simultaneously claiming they will clean up the border of rapists while encouraging black men to support them because he has their back when he is stepping on their neck.
The idiocy of those who see scared people of all races -- scared people voting for those who promise strength since he "speaks his mind" (about rape, about grabbing vaginas, about calling on the military to round up his enemies - needs to be called out.
STOP IT!
What is happening in America is happening all over the world.
People feel they have no control and are willing to support those who use military, power, and other means to hawk power as oppression that they lie will set people free.
Be wiser about this.
Not all Latinos are people of color (in fact most identify as White).
Not all Black folk are immune to misogyny, heterosexism, cis-genderism and feeling like they have been ignored and are willing to vote a Supremacist in order to teach all politicians a lesson.
Not all Asians are poor and therefore are willing to let a racist be president as long as their taxes are not raised.
Really, stop being so damned myopic and simplistic by using polls that show that basically show a human trait being displayed all over the world, in North America, Central America, South America, Asia, The Pacific, South Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Northern Africa, Western Africa, East Africa, Central Africa and South Africa. People love despots when they feel the sand is shifting beneath their feet.
Cis-genderism = Bigotry/hate/neck-stepping by those who are cisgender who target folks who are transgender and non-binary and dismiss their humanity as people who do not fit rigid definitions of gender identity that say that someone's sense of gender must match the sex with which they are assigned at birth.
WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY:
Cisgender (also styled as cisgendered and often shortened to cis) describes someone whose internal sense of gender corresponds with the sex the person was identified as having at birth.
Bad faith answer. Why would I possibly care where you went to HS. I was talking college. Only those in the NE bubble could imagine otherwise. Matty talks up state schools but hires hacks from the Ivies who are out of touch.
Can this also be explained by a better-informed public voting strategically? If you are an African-American who likes non-racist presidents, but dislike abortion, you might try voting for the non-racist president, but vote for the anti-abortion congressperson.
I generally oppose grouping Latino and African Americans into one argument. The argument that Latinos are some distinct immigrant group that will culturally maintain the degree of separation we have seen in black culture as opposed to them being a diverse group of immigrants of various races, that will act like prior immigrants is faulty. In the same way that many nativists considered first the Irish, then the Italians as something other than "white" this idea that Hispanics, who are really people of many countries and cultures who just happen to speak Spanish, will not just blend into American society as did Italians, Germans, Irish, Jews is faulty. And all those immigrants were usually attracted to the Democratic Party and with the exception of Jews shed those allegiances in a generation or two.
And perhaps the Jews who have maintained about a 2/3 Dem affiliation are different and more akin to Black voters, but I see no reason that Latinos will not go the way of the Italians and Irish in switching from strong Dem allegiances to the normal American breakdown.
I largely agree, except the reason Matt needed to talk about Latinos in this way is that's the way the polling is done, and it's still 2024, not 2042. There still is some degree of separation and non-assimilation in Latinos, (mainly because immigration is ongoing and "refills the well" continuously).
But I'd add also add that the Black experience is becoming more like the Latino one. Something like 20% of younger Black people are immigrants and probably (here I'm guessing) another 10% are the children of immigrants. And every time time Pew does their survey on interracial marriage, the percentage of Black newlyweds marrying another race gets higher. I think the latest was 22%, up from 17% in 2017.
I agree in that black cultural isolation will likely change over time, but expect it will be slower than the immigrant assimilation. The commentary on the recent NYTimes breakdown is often that race and ethnicity are becoming less of a deciding demographic as educational polarization increases, and since the percentage of Latinos and Blacks with college degrees trails the national average, that is a factor that makes their move to the GOP more likely
What is happening is that we are becoming politically polarized by our personalities, which have nothing to do with race. People who value objective reasoning and are accepting of change are moving to the left. Those who make decisions based on their emotions, value stability, and appreciate the “strength” a charismatic leader are moving right. Those who want what is “right” are partial to the Democrats, those who care about what is popular in their social group lean Republican. It’s just like high school, the nerds vs. the jocks.
I think this flatters the Democrats too much. A lot of extreme progressive stuff has been about emotions over objective reasoning.
And the "strength" of a charismatic leader - unsure. Certainly the Republicans are _currently_ voting that way, but Trump is (unfortunately and weirdly, to me) much more charismatic than Biden or Harris.
Extreme progressive stuff sure, but plenty of suburban professionals who aren’t particularly progressive have turned to the Democrats *despite the extreme progressive stuff, knowing that Congress will stop that stuff from actually happening,* due to Trumpist know-nothingism and Jan 6. Lots of Romney/McCain Democrats out there.
I'd say this is a Trump-dependent phenomenon that the GOP wouldn't see any upside in sustaining post-Trump, especially in light of how they benefited politically in state legislatures and the White House by capitalizing on backlash to Obama. Since 2008, the GOP has undertaken strategies to both preserve their power (federal judiciary appointees, gerrymandering, etc) and limit the influence of the opposition party (refusing to confirm presidential nominees) which, along with the advantage conveyed by the Electoral College, means they don't have to maximally broaden their appeal to remain viable. The latest dog whistles of DEI and CRT, along with recent judicial victories overturning significant civil rights-era measures (the preclearance provision of the VRA, affirmative action/diversity initiatives, race-specific ameliorations, etc), are too valuable to give up in an attempt to permanently capture a shaky voting bloc.
So the good news is that the public is depolarizing on race.
But the bad news is that the public, across races, is polarizing on education.
Matt misses the forest for the trees.
The tree is racial de-polarization. The forest is the sorting of the electorate by susceptibility to authoritarianism.
Scholars estimate anywhere from 1/3 to 40% of the electorate is susceptible to authoritarianism.
https://www.prri.org/press-release/survey-four-in-ten-americans-are-susceptible-to-authoritarianism-but-most-still-reject-political-violence/
They also observe authoritarians were split by Party, and have sorted Republican.
https://www.amazon.com/Authoritarianism-Polarization-American-Politics-Hetherington/dp/052171124X
Obviously Trump has turbo-charged the sorting.
Do the math. If 33 - 40% of the population is attrracted to authoritarianism it does not take much sorting before one party becomes majority authoritarian, we have all seen this.
The appeal of authoritarianism crosses races. Trump's open authoritarian appeals are pulling non-white authoritarians over the line. This is Trump's core strategy, and he might just pull it off. It is the core strategy of all authoritarians: Appeal to authoritarians and they will come. Repetition will de-densitize non-authoritarians, allowing the authoritarian to become more explicit as time passes.
The real story is authoritarianism's enduring appeal to a frighteningly large number, and how it can be exploited.
If authoritarians again become evenly sorted by party racial polarization will rise. Contra Matt, that will be a very good thing.
Bizaarely, we would all do well if Democrats became more attractive to authoritarians.
"If this ends up narrowly costing Harris the election, I’ll be very sad about that. But as a broad social trend, it’s change for the better."
Great piece overall, and were it not for Trump's authoritarian ambitions I would agree with this conclusion. But if this trend (or any trend) narrowly costs Harris the election, I think it's actually really hard to say what future coalitional politics will look like after decades of authoritarian rule and hard-right policymaking. This is kind of analogous to making predictions just as Franco took power about what coalitional dynamics will be in the 1982 Spanish election. It's just way too early to say whether any given trend will/won't hold up and will/won't be broadly beneficial. For all we know, the next free and fair election in America will turn on rebuilding our social insurance system after the right-wing autocracy kept it smaller than the public would like (much like Franco did), and that could bring back an Obama-style coaltion.
We could be on the cusp of losing our welfare state and basic rights for women for generations and being locked out of power indefinitely - that's far bigger stakes than just being really sad about a temporary setback!
While I agree largely w/ Matt's argument, the problem is there isn't as much evidence for racial polarization as people think there is.
In good polling that oversamples speciifc minorities or the youth vote don't show the sort of swings that are in worse polling.
As I've said before, could I buy a shift of a point or two toward Trump in the youth or African-American vote and maybe the Hispanic vote being 55/45 instead of 60/40?
Sure.
But, no I don't think Trump is going to go 50/50 or win Hispanics, get 25% of the male African-American vote, or come a lot closer winning the youth vote, and I think honestly, while some of it is legitimate, these polling numbers are being used as kludges to try to move the Democrat's back to the right.
Because weirdly, whenever a minority has a centrist or conservative view on something, that's proof the Democrat's need to moderate, but when a minority group has more liberal views, that's just "identity politics."
There isn't some kind of vast Third Way conspiracy theory to push the party to the center for some vaguely nefarious reasons. There are lots of people who want to win elections and the available evidence suggests moving closer to the center would better achieve that goal and nonwhite Democrats, on average, tend to be more moderate in their views than the party as a whole.
Pack any more copium into your argument and you’ll have to start watching out for the Qing army.
To me it's worth thinking carefully about where racial depolarization is lower. Age is mentioned -- meaning older white voters and older black voters show markedly different voting patterns. This probably also explains an initially counterintuitive fact -- accord ing to one survey (see link) more education, if anything, is correlated with republican identification among black voters. But it also makes me think about links between education/race/income. I wonder if nowadays education 'depolarizes' race - among highly educated voters race is less a factor than for other voters.
Survey on education, race, and party affiliation by pew: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/partisanship-by-race-ethnicity-and-education/
Probably. Black Republicans, i imagine, are less churchy, because the black church is a huge GOTV operation for Dems (as evangelical white churches are for the Republicans)
Hi, when is Matt's full chat with Nate Silver yesterday gonna be up?
Thanks in advance!
Overall agree with Matt that this is a good thing. More issues bad rather than race based politics.
I think the big fear among Democrats boils down to this: surveys have consistently shown conservatives in the U.S. outnumbering liberals, so if every conservative votes Republican, every liberal votes Democrat, and moderates split 50/50, Republicans would win every election. To compete, Democrats must either win over at least some conservatives and/or win a supermajority of moderates.
Back in the 1980's, voting was much less polarized along liberal/conservative lines, so this didn't matter much. But, then in the 1990's and 2000's, white conservatives become almost universally Republican; starting in 2016, the same thing began happening with Hispanic voters, and starting in 2020, we're seeing evidence of the same starting to happen with black voters. Meanwhile, by 2016, virtually all liberals who had previously voted Republican had already shifted to Democrats, leaving no further upside in that regard, but still plenty of conservative Democrats remaining as low-hanging fruit for Republicans.
Counter-balancing this, Trump has driven away many moderate voters, allowing Democrats to get that supermajority of moderate voters needed to with only a minimal share of conservative voters. But, the fear among many is, how sustainable is this, once Trump is gone?
My personal take is that electoral impulses to please the base and get more donations will push Republicans to the right until enough moderates are pushed to the Democrats into Republicans can't move right any more without ceding control of the country to the Democrats, while, conversely, Democrats will know that they need a supermajority of moderate voters to win, so can't afford to placate the left wing like Republicans can, the right wing. And, when all is said and done, things will settle with moderate voters voting blue by whatever margin is needed to keep the overall balance of the two parties competitive. And, politics continues the way it always has (albeit, with potentially a different set of states being swing states).
"But tradeoffs are real in the electorate as well as in policymaking."
This is true, but it cuts in both directions. It sometimes feels like it's an article of faith among moderates that Democratic candidates can always pick up votes by moving to the right or staging a "Sister Souljah moment", but I think they're not always appropriately weighing the votes they could lose on the left.
We have years of election results that suggest moving to the center in a general election is electorally optimal. Look at, for example, Jon Tester. No one would argue that the issue is that he's not progressive enough. John Bel Edwards wasn't penalized by the left for being anti-abortion and Manchin wasn't penalized by the left for being pro-coal.
There's probably an argument that moving too far to the right could cost Democrats but that would require the Democrat to move so far to the right that they're indistinguishable from their Republican opponent or even more conservative and nowadays really only happens in hyper local races in ancestrally Democratic regions.
“Activate the base” vs “Moderate to pick up swing voters” both sound plausible in principle. Both can be pushed by different factions within the party for Pundit Fallacy reasons.
But my understanding is that when the Moneyball analytics types run the numbers, it does in fact turn out that Moderation works better for getting more votes. I haven’t yet seen much good substantive argument the other way, and I’d be very interested to hear it.
I feel like there's a decent shot at a scenario where Kamala Harris wins comfortably because of increased female turnout which is skewing heavily towards her; an effect that isn't being measured by regular polling because it's not taking into account turnout proclivity. Which, for Harris, would be a very worthwhile tradeoff with other demographic groups, obviously.
Wrong. Absolutely Wrong.
First off, the Electoral College is the vestige of a Supremacist Handshake between Northern racists -- who enshrined school segregation in New York City, which today is the most segregated school system in America -- and Southern Slave owners who wanted Black people who were enslaved to count as 3/4 of a human being for population counts that would give them a little more power.
If you are going to mention the Electoral College you need also always mention that it exists to give White-dominated states with smaller populations more power relative to states where White folk are in the minority (like California, where two-thirds of the electorate are not White Europeans).
Until we have a national vote, idiotic columns like this eschew the institutionalized racism endemic to an Electoral college that allows for the national vote to be superceded today by politicians who only need to wrack up points in racist states and then convince a few folks who are not people of color but are labelled as such (Most Latinos in the United States self-identify as Whites), or people of African or Asian descent who vote don't eschew sexism or heterosexism and like how Trump degrades women and queer folks and non-binary folk that what is important is he is moralistically crusading as someone who believes, religiously, what he believes.
All across the world fear is being used to embrace those who hawk despotism as power.
When people feel like they are walking on quicksand, when clueless pontificators read tea leaves without context, they say things like the electorate is less racially polarized.
What's happening?
Some people who have been fed lies about Trump being strong.
Some people know that both parties are politically corrupt gravitate to those who will lie and promise them everything under the sun.
Puckering with the lips of their mouths and their asses, they will say one thing to one audience and a different thing the next day to a different audience but with both audiences promising to make decisions without equivocation, without thought, decisions that touch what is most basic and base about human folly.
We live in an era where folks are scared because journalists don't right about fascistic tendencies and and make it seem to folks who know better that what the country needs is a strongman who speaks his mind.
I am Black and male. More than a few black male cousins voted for Trump against both Biden and Hillary and plan to do so against a Black woman too.
Trump's misogyny, sexism, and fronting the power of male domination is something that all men regardless of race can and will embrace.
That is what is happening. Some people of color who lie in bed with fascists because fascism is not solely a purview of Whites (African and South American and Caribbean prelates and dictators who bash queers for example don't care that those queers look like them) or who subjugate with violence women.
Humans are clannish no doubt, but they tend to fear when the ground beneath them is shifting because of economic instability, racial gender bashing instability, queer bashing instability.
All men regardless of race can easily see themselves in Trump.
If the racial depolarization is due to Men of color embracing trumps misogyny. If it is due to Trump pandering to White Latinos who clueless pollsters don't see as white but people of color. If it is due to governments from Russia to Turkey to Germany to Italy to France to Nigeria embracing supremacist focused despots and folks embracing those who speak to their baser sexist and heterosexist instincts.
If that is racial depolarization, then call it what it is.
Be smarter than pontificating we are "less racially polarized in our voting."
You parrot a certain myopia when you do that. We are becoming more racially polarized in America but some people of color don't mind voting for strongmen who hawk hatred of women and queers.
For more than a decade Trump and his cohorts push propaganda and hate related to religion, hawking white supremacy as strength while simultaneously claiming they will clean up the border of rapists while encouraging black men to support them because he has their back when he is stepping on their neck.
The idiocy of those who see scared people of all races -- scared people voting for those who promise strength since he "speaks his mind" (about rape, about grabbing vaginas, about calling on the military to round up his enemies - needs to be called out.
STOP IT!
What is happening in America is happening all over the world.
People feel they have no control and are willing to support those who use military, power, and other means to hawk power as oppression that they lie will set people free.
Be wiser about this.
Not all Latinos are people of color (in fact most identify as White).
Not all Black folk are immune to misogyny, heterosexism, cis-genderism and feeling like they have been ignored and are willing to vote a Supremacist in order to teach all politicians a lesson.
Not all Asians are poor and therefore are willing to let a racist be president as long as their taxes are not raised.
Really, stop being so damned myopic and simplistic by using polls that show that basically show a human trait being displayed all over the world, in North America, Central America, South America, Asia, The Pacific, South Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Northern Africa, Western Africa, East Africa, Central Africa and South Africa. People love despots when they feel the sand is shifting beneath their feet.
Cis-genderism?
Cis-genderism = Bigotry/hate/neck-stepping by those who are cisgender who target folks who are transgender and non-binary and dismiss their humanity as people who do not fit rigid definitions of gender identity that say that someone's sense of gender must match the sex with which they are assigned at birth.
WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY:
Cisgender (also styled as cisgendered and often shortened to cis) describes someone whose internal sense of gender corresponds with the sex the person was identified as having at birth.
So when I confronted Milan about being a private school elite. he claimed to go to a public school. Yale has changed a lot
What I said is that I went to a public school for K-12, which is true
Bad faith answer. Why would I possibly care where you went to HS. I was talking college. Only those in the NE bubble could imagine otherwise. Matty talks up state schools but hires hacks from the Ivies who are out of touch.
I don’t think it’s people in the northeast bubble who usually assume you mean high school when you ask “where did you go to school?”
Milan did
Can this also be explained by a better-informed public voting strategically? If you are an African-American who likes non-racist presidents, but dislike abortion, you might try voting for the non-racist president, but vote for the anti-abortion congressperson.
I enjoyed the article.
I generally oppose grouping Latino and African Americans into one argument. The argument that Latinos are some distinct immigrant group that will culturally maintain the degree of separation we have seen in black culture as opposed to them being a diverse group of immigrants of various races, that will act like prior immigrants is faulty. In the same way that many nativists considered first the Irish, then the Italians as something other than "white" this idea that Hispanics, who are really people of many countries and cultures who just happen to speak Spanish, will not just blend into American society as did Italians, Germans, Irish, Jews is faulty. And all those immigrants were usually attracted to the Democratic Party and with the exception of Jews shed those allegiances in a generation or two.
And perhaps the Jews who have maintained about a 2/3 Dem affiliation are different and more akin to Black voters, but I see no reason that Latinos will not go the way of the Italians and Irish in switching from strong Dem allegiances to the normal American breakdown.
Strangely, this strikes home to me because of my first time going to the State Fair of Texas, on a random weekday.
Probably one of the most unsegregagted demographics I have ever seen.
Totally anecdotal, but I was surprised. Particularly because the concessions and parking and things are quite expensive.
I largely agree, except the reason Matt needed to talk about Latinos in this way is that's the way the polling is done, and it's still 2024, not 2042. There still is some degree of separation and non-assimilation in Latinos, (mainly because immigration is ongoing and "refills the well" continuously).
But I'd add also add that the Black experience is becoming more like the Latino one. Something like 20% of younger Black people are immigrants and probably (here I'm guessing) another 10% are the children of immigrants. And every time time Pew does their survey on interracial marriage, the percentage of Black newlyweds marrying another race gets higher. I think the latest was 22%, up from 17% in 2017.
I agree in that black cultural isolation will likely change over time, but expect it will be slower than the immigrant assimilation. The commentary on the recent NYTimes breakdown is often that race and ethnicity are becoming less of a deciding demographic as educational polarization increases, and since the percentage of Latinos and Blacks with college degrees trails the national average, that is a factor that makes their move to the GOP more likely
What is happening is that we are becoming politically polarized by our personalities, which have nothing to do with race. People who value objective reasoning and are accepting of change are moving to the left. Those who make decisions based on their emotions, value stability, and appreciate the “strength” a charismatic leader are moving right. Those who want what is “right” are partial to the Democrats, those who care about what is popular in their social group lean Republican. It’s just like high school, the nerds vs. the jocks.
I think this flatters the Democrats too much. A lot of extreme progressive stuff has been about emotions over objective reasoning.
And the "strength" of a charismatic leader - unsure. Certainly the Republicans are _currently_ voting that way, but Trump is (unfortunately and weirdly, to me) much more charismatic than Biden or Harris.
Extreme progressive stuff sure, but plenty of suburban professionals who aren’t particularly progressive have turned to the Democrats *despite the extreme progressive stuff, knowing that Congress will stop that stuff from actually happening,* due to Trumpist know-nothingism and Jan 6. Lots of Romney/McCain Democrats out there.